A Philosophy - If You can Get One

The Germans of the Weimar period were increasingly frustrated, angry, disgusted with the “system,” and ready for change. So are Americans. The Germans, following their intellectuals, were disgusted with what they regarded as reason and freedom, and they were ready for Hitler. The Americans are disgusted with unreason and statism; but they are directionless. Without intellectual guidance, they do not know what went wrong with their system or how to prevent the country’s disintegration and collapse.

Thus, by default – despite the profound differences between Americans and the pre-Hitler Germans – the similarities between the two nations, the similarities between their intellectuals and the social trends they shape, are growing. The most ominous aspect of the trend is that, if it is not reversed, it will ultimately change the character of the American people. It has already begun to do so.

The philosophy that shapes a nation’s culture and institutions tends, other things being equal, to become a self-fulfilling prophecy: by creating the conditions and setting of men’s daily life, it increasingly establishes itself as an unquestioned frame of reference in most people’s minds. A society shaped by altruism, for instance – a society of chronic, politically enforced man-eat-man policies in the name of “the public welfare” – leads many of its victims to feel that safety lies in flaunting public service, that selfishness (the “selfishness” of others, who are draining them) is a threat, and that the solution is to urge and practice greater selflessness. A society shaped by collectivism, in which the only effective means of survival is the group or the state, leads many to feel that the ideas and the personal independence appropriate to an individualist era are no longer possible or relevant. A society shaped by irrationalism – a society dominated by incomprehensible crisis and inexplicable injustice and the constant eruptions of a senseless, nihilist culture – leads many to feel that the world cannot be understood, i.e, that their own mind is inadequate, and that they need guidance from some higher power.

Thus, corrupt ideas, once institutionalized, tend to be continually reinforced (the same would hold true of rational ideas); and the unphilosophical men, however decent their own unidentified premises might be, eventually succumb. Across a span of generations they gradually relinquish any better heritage. In part, they are yielding to the explicit ideological promptings of their teachers and the universities. In part, they are adapting resignedly to what they have come to accept from their own experience as the facts and necessities of life.

The American spirit has not yet been destroyed, but it cannot withstand this kind of undermining indefinitely. If the United States continues to go the way of all Europe, the people’s rebellion against the present intellectual leadership will be perverted, and re-channeled into an opposite course.

Nonintellectual rebels cannot challenge the fundamental ideas they have been taught. All they can do by way of rebellion is to accept a series of false alternatives urged by their teachers, and then defiantly choose what they regard as the anti-establishment side. Thus, the proliferation of groups that uphold anti-intellectuality as the only alternative to today’s intellectuals; mindless activism as the alternative to “moderation”; Christian faith as the alternative to nihilism; female inferiority as the alternative to feminism; racism as the alternative to egalitarianism; sacrifice in behalf of a united nation, as the alternative to sacrifice on behalf of warring pressure groups; and government controls for the sake of the middle class, as the alternative to government controls for the sake of the rich or the poor.

The type of mentality produced by these choices – activist, religionist, racist, nationalist, authoritarian – would have been familiar in the Weimar Republic.

If it happens here, the primary responsibility will not belong to the people, who still reject such a mentality and are groping for a better kind of answer. The responsibility will belong to those who banished from the schools all knowledge of the original American system, and who would have finally convinced the nation that men’s only choice is a choice of dictatorships.

No one can predict the form or the timing of the catastrophe that will befall this country if our direction is not changed. No one can know the concatenation of crises, in what progression of steps and across what interval of years, would finally break the nation’s spirit and system of government. No one can know whether such a breakdown would lead to an American dictatorship directly – or indirectly, after a civil war and/or a protracted Dark Ages of primitive roving gangs.

What one can know is only this much: the end result of the country’s present course is some kind of dictatorship; and the cultural-political signs for may years now have been pointing increasingly to one kind in particular. The signs have been pointing to an American form of Nazism.

If the political trend remains unchanged, the same fate – collapse and ultimate dictatorship – is in store for the countries of Western Europe, which are farther along the statist road than America is, and which are now obviously In the process of decline and disintegration. (The Communist countries and the so-called “third world” have long since fallen, or have never risen to anything.) A European dictatorship need not be identical to an American one; dictatorships can vary widely in form, according to a given people’s special history, traditions, and crises; in form, but not in essence. Most of the East is gone. The West is going.

A German intellectual made the following statement after the Nazis fell from power.

”In the early days of Hitler’s regime, he recalled, anyone troubled by the Nazi practices and concerned about Germany’s future was shrugged off as an alarmist. And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.”

One can “know, or surmise the end” by knowing what cause produces what effect, i.e., what factor determines the fate of nations. Today, the only nation still capable of saving itself, and thereby the world, is the United States. It can do so only by one means. The Constitution cannot stop the trend. A constitution, however noble, cannot stand the death or eclipse of its animating principle. Religion cannot stop the trend. It helped to cause it.

The demonstrated practicality of the original American system cannot stop the trend. Practicality as such does not move nations.

The profound differences between America and Germany – the differences in history, institutions, heroes, national character, starting premises - cannot stop the trend. After a century, a crucial similarity began to develop between the two countries, the similarity of basic ideas; and this one similarity is gradually overriding, subverting, or negating the differences, and consigning their remnants to the dead end the unappreciated, the undefended, the historically impotent.

There is only one antidote to today’s trend: a new, pro-reason philosophy. Such a philosophy would have to offer for the first time a full statement and an unbreached defense of the fundamental ideas of America.

The same German intellectual quoted above, looking back at Hitler's rise to power said,

"Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national enemies', without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?"

Well, read the book then. The thesis is that philosophy is what truly moves the world. It determines the choices that individuals make. If the philosophy they are taught is anti-American, then so will their choices be. His point in the Ominous Parallels is that the same ideas that led to Nazism in Germany are being taught and accepted in America today by philosophers.

And ideas often assume a life of their own.

Eric Voegelin had some very intersting ideas concerning the condition and direction of Western civilization. He's a tough read, but worth the effort.

For example, Voegelin observes that many liberal intellectuals object in one way or another to totalitarianism, but fail to realize that their own worldview shares common ground with Communism and Nazism. As Voegelin puts it: "The true dividing line in the contemporary crisis does not run between liberals and totalitarians, but between the religious and philosophical transcendentalists on the one side and the liberal and totalitarian immanentist sectarians on the other side."

22 posted on 03/04/2007 11:26:04 PM PST by Noumenon (The Koran is the Mein Kampf of a religion that has always aimed to eliminate the others - O. Fallaci)

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